Story Links
Oct. 18, 2001
By Scott Barbee
Patients who visit Dr. Nelson Yarbrough in Charlottesville, know him first and foremost as their dentist. What you may not know is that the man who now makes his living keeping people’s teeth healthy, strong, and clean is a veteran of the Virginia football tradition who just can’t seem to let go of his connection at the University.
As a letterman in 1956 and 1957, Yarbrough was a man of many hats for the Cavalier football squad. He was the starting quarterback, as well as a cornerback and the punter.
“Everybody did that, though,” he says about his multiple roles. “You had to be solid on both sides of the ball, otherwise you didn’t play.” Yarbrough was more than solid though. “In ’56 I led the ACC in passing with 626 yards, and that was when Sonny Jurgenson was at Duke! We only threw the ball five or six times a game back then,” he says.
After graduating in 1959, Yarbrough enlisted in the military and spent two years as a player/coach for a team in France.
“That was a big deal back then because there were so many troops all around the world. All the service academies had very good teams at the time, and they all enlisted, players from the top schools who eventually ended up in the pro leagues.”
He then came back across the Atlantic for a year to play in the Canadian Football League for the Montreal Alouettes. A shoulder injury sidelined him, however, and before the next season started, Yarbrough decided to take a different career path.
“I figured I would be better off as a dentist, rather then a [football] player, and I needed physics to get into dental school, so I went home to Tampa to take a few classes,” he says. His classes turned out to be important for other reasons as well.
“It where I met my wife,” says Yarbrough, “she and I were lab partners!”
Yarbrough attended Medical College of Virginia for dentistry, and then he and his wife, who was also a dentist, found two openings for dentists at the University of Virginia hospital. “We worked there for four years. When our time was up we had to decide whether to go back to Florida or stay here. Of course, we stayed, and I went into private practice in 1972.”
Now at age 64, Dr. Yarbrough is still running his practice here in Charlottesville, but he has never forgotten the benefits of his time as a student-athlete at the University.
“When you play a sport at a major college level, it gives you a certain amount of toughness that helps you in anything that you do in life. It prepares you for the worst of times so that you can stand up to just about anything. The biggest thing, though, is the friendships that you made that last for a lifetime. My closest friends after 40 years are still the guys I played ball with and my fraternity brothers from Sigma Nu. As you get older, you appreciate how much your school meant to you, and I’ve always felt like you should give something back to the University.”
In that giving manner, Dr. Yarbrough is now helping all of Virginia’s graduated football players rediscover their University roots as the President of the Football Alumni Group.The Alumni Group was started about five years ago, and Yarbrough gives a lot of the credit for the organization’s success to former UVa head coach George Welsh, who retired at the end of last season.
“About five years ago, George felt like he wanted to help start gathering a bunch of football alumni together. He was a great help because having him here for 19 years really brought some continuity to the program.” The idea was a huge success, and now in its first year of membership, the number of active football alumni has reached over 320.The purpose of the group is “for us to have a good time,” Yarbrough says. He is also proud of how many former football players, including himself, have been ab le to re-establish old friendships in the process.
“A lot of times when an athlete leaves and they live far away, they don’t have a connection to the University and they lose touch, especially when we had so many coaching changes before George [Welsh]. We’ve brought a lot of those guys back into the fold. In fact, at the Richmond game this year, I saw one of the fellas that played with me, and I hadn’t seen him since graduation! He’d been in the Air Force and recently retired, so I had no idea that he was going to be there. He knew I was involved because he had been receiving newsletters. It was really great to see him.”
One of Yarbrough’s goals as president is to make the rest of the community aware of what football alumni, like his friend Carl Smith, are doing. The group also wants to celebrate Virginia’s football history, and in conjunction with VSAF, they will honor the first four black scholarship players from 1972 during the Florida State game on Oct. 20.
Yarbrough enjoys current players too, and claims that some things never change.
“Having been here for so long, I’ve gotten to know so many of the players over the years. I’ve even seen a lot of them as patients, and when it was within the rules, we used to have players at our house for Thanksgiving…. Even last year, at a dinner with all of the graduating seniors, we learned that it didn’t make any difference whether you were 22, 32, 42, or 62, we all enjoyed the same things, and the locker room talk hadn’t changed.”